“Back in November, The Daily initially uncovered the existence of an iPad version of the Microsoft Office Suite. Sources now say that the app will soon be submitted to Apple for approval,” Matt Hickey reports for The Daily.

“A brief hands-on with a working prototype of the software revealed a number of new things,” Hickey reports. “The app’s user interface is similar to the current OneNote app, but it has hints of Metro… Word, Excel and PowerPoint files can be created and edited locally and online. But it’s unclear if Microsoft will support other Office apps at launch or at all.”

Hickey reports, “Sources close to the matter also commented that an Android version of Office is not in the works.”

MacDailyNews Take: For those who consider Office a necessity (most businesses, government, etc.), this will be yet another strike against Google’s Android and another positive for Windows Phone and Windows 8 which will surely have its own version of Office, too. Along with increasing royalty payments and legal losses that decrease functionality and usability, Office availability will be a big reason why Microsoft will likely soon begin to eat into Google’s Android market share.

Nice Kimber ;^) CloudOn is definitely good to go – as are the Apple offerings. The key thing I wonder about is how “feature rich” iPad Office will be in comparison to available apps. And the pricing better be very competitive, to. Otherwise it’s good that MS recognizes the importance of having an iPad presence.

I’m surprised how well CloudOn works really. I’m not a big excel user but both my mom and uncle are, they both said it works great. My mom has an iPad 2 and my uncle will be buying one this week or so. (for his new business an iPad is going to replace his current setup)

I tolerate Office on my Mac only because I can’t be bothered to work out the minor incompatibilities that exist when clients send me documents formatted in Word. I don’t think I’ll be springing for Office for iPad as it”ll be a bloated piece of trash.

I’ll stick with Documenta to Go for now. I don’t do much editing on the iPad as incompatibilities invariably arise because the simplified interface on the iPad messes with deep level formatting on the document. For review and editing of Office documents I turn to my Mac.

Microsoft will be forced to remove most of the bloat in order to make Office run on iPad. I would use the iPad version of Excel—but that’s it. Word is a piece of filth, and PowerPoint causes brain damage.

i hope they have separate apps for Word, Excel, & ppt. I have so many excel files that Numbers doesn’t like that it would make my life easier.

That said, Keynote is much better than PowerPoint. I work in a mixed Windows/OSX environment and .pptx files and files made with the Windows version of Powerpoint are better opened with Keynote than my old version of MS Office for Mac (it’s at least two versions old, so I can’t blame MS for the fact I haven’t upgraded…well, I can, since I hated the last two versions after a test upgrade). Fonts look nicer, too. Jebus I hate Helvetica in MS applications. It looks like shizzle.

Okay, I’ll admit – when I got my MBP, I got MS Office, not iWork. The main reason was it had more online compatibility features. But then iWork introduced compatibility with iOS, and then iCloud. Now it’s still a tough call. Yes, I prefer MacOS a million times to Windows. But between MS Office and iWork? That’s still a tough call.

Count me in as one of the people who hates going over their Pages export because others are entrenched in MicroHell. That said, I don’t know if it warrants a separate contribution to the Borg in order to make this easier on my iPad. I think it’ll depend on pricing.